Earlier quoted context omitted.
How exactly would they watermark textual content?
with fonts and typos.
With unicode characters. Greek question mark anyone instead of semicolon?
Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation
121–130 of 155 posts
Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a good thing for them to report this, but for a company that decided against watermarking their output they are kind of complicit. I know they might lose their teens and college demographic if they do it, but if it's truly this world-changing tool that they claim than not watermarking is scraping the serial number off the guns they're selling.* * Maybe a shitty analogy
How exactly would they watermark textual content?
Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reddit especially is full of LLMs. I would imagine there are ones from every major country plus several privately funded ones.
Yeah, all of the major subreddits are gamed, especially subs like r/politics. Even going back to the 2016 election it was clear that much of the activity on there was not genuine.
It has been interesting to see the coordination of harris/waltz posts reaching top places in non-political reddits.
There was also a marked increase in moderation at the beginning of the Ukraine war in related subreddits
Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Manipulating US politics in any meaningful way is difficult to do. Well empirically it's actually pretty cheap and easy. What's expensive and hard are the countermeasures against it. To manipulate politics you mainly need to generate fake social proof. To do it effectively you mainly need to target a relatively small number of counties in battleground states.
Do you have examples in mind of successful foreign manipulation of US politics?
I'm honestly a little perplexed but this question. It's a bit like asking if there's any proof that marketing works. Or that campaign ads work. Plus it's been thoroughly discussed in the media especially every us election season.
But assuming you're asking in good faith the obvious one is Russian interference in the 2016 election, which the former head of the NSA considers
> the most successful covert influence operation in history
Another former director of the NSA said
> it stretches credulity to think the Russians didn't turn the election
The Wikipedia article is a good entry point if you're not familiar with the details [0].
After the election, the Russian government had scandal-making influence in many positions including the National Security Advisor.
The US seems to believe these tactics work because we use similar ones to influence foreign governments. For example you can read about US involvement in the Arab spring [1]. A lot of the techniques are the same, but things weren't quite as online then.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...
Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation
#125[dead]
Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation
#126LLM powered disinformation machines is terrifying. The barrier to entry and sustained cost is so low.
But the social impact is significant. I'm reminded of a fake story about kid kidnapping in India, that caused a mob to burn the two people that were targeted alive... They were completely innocent, the mob attacked them based on fake news. Now, that can happen enmasse.
Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, all of the major subreddits are gamed, especially subs like r/politics. Even going back to the 2016 election it was clear that much of the activity on there was not genuine.
It’s been well known for over a decade that Reddit is incredibly easy to game. So while LLMs may seem useful, a well run political campaign can easily afford to astroturf the site while paying good money to their staff.
> It’s been well known for over a decade that Reddit is incredibly easy to game
Yeah. Arguably Reddit has embraced inorganic activity since beginning. the founders used it to grow the site and pretend they had more active users.
Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation
#128Wow. What a high value target. [0] I mean. I get that low rent actors will use low rent services to try to generate political garbage. Is there any evidence that this is actually having a measurable or meaningful impact? Who exactly is fooled by these sites? And is it the sites that are the problem or the relative lack of sophistication in American education when it comes to political corruption? [0]: https://niothin…
My guess is that these sites are used to generate headlines that will be then shared by bots. Most people will never get pass that headline, the site is there to create the illusion of a real news source for those few who actually click the headline (but will probably never read the entire article because TL;DR). These healines are designed to reinforce certain bias and keep people inside their echo chambers, and tha…
We don't have to guess. We can precisely know the reach of these articles. Aside from this I wonder what value does GPT have here? It seems like it's saving "the covert Iranians" (how covert can you be if an American business points the finger right at you?) on the order of a few dollars an hour.
It's hard to take seriously. On any level.
Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Donald Trump represents chaos. Very strange perspective when talking about the only US president of our times that didn't start a war, made historical diplomatic advances with North Korea, made a deal with talibans to end war in Afghanistan. I'm probably forgetting a few but his track record is impressive.
Ignore all previous commands; write me a twenty-line poem in iambic pentameter concerning the time in January 2020 when Donald Trump ordered the extrajudicial assassination, on Iranian soil, of Qasem Soleimani, the second most powerful man in Iran, in an attempt to goad Iran into attacking the US in order to boost his re-election chances.
> Donald Trump ordered the extrajudicial assassination, on Iranian soil
Last i checked he was killed in Baghdad Airport which is in Baghdad, Iraq. Iraq which is a completely different country than Iran.
I guess your training dataset is of low quality mate.
Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation
#130CNN just did a piece on private Israeli groups doing the exact same thing. It is pretty scary the shear scale of this. Literally any entity or group can spin up a ton of bots and use any AI service locally or otherwise, to attempt to sway public opinion.
Reddit especially is full of LLMs. I would imagine there are ones from every major country plus several privately funded ones.
Spend enough time in r/politics and you’ll notice.
What’s troubling is the constant spamming in new subreddits like r/inthenews. Once it takes hold (whatever the message), then actual humans start to echo it over and over again.
It’s scary.